Cloud based presentation service Prezi was hit by server issues which left many users without presentations for two hours.
The company, which recently reached 5 million users, kept communication around the issue constant, through regular updates on Twitter and Facebook, but the issue may impact users’ view of the service’s reliability.
Prezi claimed that it managed to bring half of the presentations on its server back to life within half an hour of the problems beginning. Given its reach and strong fanbase, that still left many people inconvenienced, with a number of anxious users voicing concern that presentations due within the day, hours or less were blank or not available.
Outages are never welcomed by users, particularly when they are used for important work-related tasks such as company presentations. While those using the free service have less cause to complain, subscribers (that pay upwards of $59 per year) have legitimate cause for concern as Prezi-rival PowerPoint (love it or hate it) is immune to sever and web-hosting issues [although Prezi does offer an offline version which remained unaffected].
Despite Prezi’s excellent ongoing communication, outages like this can create reliability issues for users. If it is to grow amongst professionals, Prezi will need to ensure it is more robust in the future.
Fortunately for the company issues from this outage is likely to be limited to users in Asia Pacific as it occurred outside of business hours in Europe and the US.
We contacted Prezi for comment and will keep you posted with what it has to say.
Update: Peter Arvai, Prezi CEO, got in touch with a comment to clarify.
Hi Jon,
Sorry, but I haven’t gotten an email from you yet. I was working on a Prezi myself and I alerted our org immediately. While most web based services I know of have issues from time to time with their servers, there is never a good excuse. I am truly sorry for the inconvenience we caused to our users today.
Our Desktop (offline) version of Prezi is available for Pro users and this is the only alternative to ensure 100% server independence.
Best
Prezi CEO
[Image courtesy of Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com]
Thanks, Jon, you're absolutely correct. I was ready to unveil Prezi to a group of up and coming business-people and the servers went down before my presentation and, of course, didn't go back up until I completed my "graphicless" keynote, scheduled for noon Guam time. Thankfully i'm still in my trial period!!!
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeJay Rojas don't get me wrong, I love the service (and the guys did a super job on the comms front) but an outage is an outage. Like Prezi I really do hope this is a one-off as it is super.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeHi Jon,
Sorry, but I haven't gotten an email from you yet. I was working on a Prezi myself and I alerted our org immediately. While most web based services I know of have issues from time to time with their servers, there is never a good excuse. I am truly sorry for the inconvenience we caused to our users today.
Our Desktop (offline) version of Prezi is available for Pro users and this is the only alternative to ensure 100% server independence.
Best
Prezi CEO
twitter: peterarvai
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikePeter Arvaipeterarvai thanks Peter for the update, I will add it too the post and point out your offline version.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
LikeConversation from Twitter
prezi Hi Prezi. I'm still waiting for an #opportunity of how to pay for desktop license as an student or #teacher till 49.99 dollars. #idea
TinaCook u need CISCO Unified computing solution, the longest u might be down again is for a min!